Home

MySQL-protobuf

This repo contains a work in progress version of MySQL that has native support for Protocol Buffers, Google's data interchange format. It was developed by a former Google intern during the summer of 2015 and open sourced around October of the same year.

Motivation

Before doing the implementation, we spent a short amount of time studying the benefits of having native protobuf support in MySQL. Two notable advantages are:

reduced disk usage, due to the compactness of the protobufs binary representation

very fast schema changes, providing you only change the protobuf schema. What this actually means is that you can very well group your non-key columns inside a protobuf, store them in MySQL as a protobuf column and if you decide to make some changes this is done without rewriting the table. Of course, the changes have to be backwards compatible with the old protobuf schema.